Enterprises frequently generate a variety of business documents for daily business activities. These documents may include purchase orders, invoices, thank-you letters, invitation letters, and the like. The primary responsibility for generating these documents typically falls upon information workers, who are the employees within the business enterprises that spend a majority of their time analyzing and reporting on information about their business and making decisions based on these analyses. When generating the business documents, information workers typically employ productivity software applications, such as word processing applications, spreadsheet applications, electronic mail applications, and presentation applications, for example.
Although information workers often employ productivity applications to generate business documents, key business information needed for the documents typically resides in large, back-end databases and line-of-business (LOB) applications. These LOB applications capture and store a wide variety of business information and include systems, for example, for resource planning, customer relationship management, financial reporting, accounting, and project management. LOB applications typically include databases or data warehouses, servers, and server applications that collect and manage the data, and in many cases, specialized front-end applications that enable users to interact with the data.
There exists a deep divide between the LOB applications used to collect and store business information and productivity applications typically used by information workers to generate business documents. Currently, neither productivity applications nor LOB applications provide a convenient solution for information workers to merge LOB application data with business documents in productivity applications. Generally, when information workers generate business documents, they must create the document using a productivity application, switch to an LOB application, copy required business data, switch back to the productivity application, and paste the business data into the document. This approach sacrifices productivity as information workers must continuously switch back and forth between various applications. In addition, the act of copying and pasting data from one application to another introduces opportunities for error.
Another approach is to develop custom solutions for merging LOB application data with productivity application documents. For example, macro programming may be performed to pull data from external LOB applications and place the data within sections of a document within a productivity application. However, development of such custom solutions requires specialized knowledge that the typical information worker does not possess. Instead, programmers from an IT department are often required to develop the custom solutions. Accordingly, such custom solutions are inefficient, requiring programming and IT costs to be incurred. In addition, each custom solution is very specific to a particular document, requiring a solution to be developed for each business document used by an enterprise. Further, if any changes are required to a particular business document, a programmer must modify the custom solution.